Abstract

A key tenet of bone tissue engineering is the development of scaffold materials that can stimulate stem cell differentiation in the absence of chemical treatment to become osteoblasts without compromising material properties. Recently, the authors have shown that two types of slightly disordered arrays of nanopits stimulate human mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to produce bone mineral in vitro, in the absence of osteogenic supplements. In this article, they aim at optimizing the topographic parameters to stimulate MSCs to form bone cells. They have developed a high-speed electron beam technique to pattern areas with dots. In three steps, they (1) systematically changed the degree of disorder from from a perfect square arrangement with a pitch, (2) changed the pit diameter from , and (3) explored the importance of pits versus pillars. They found that arrays of pillars tall with a diameter of and a disorder of provided the optimal conditions for stimulating MSCs to form bone cells.

Received 17 June 2008Accepted 11 August 2008Published online 01 December 2008

Acknowledgments:

The work was supported by BBSRC Grant No. BBE5260151. We are indebted to M. Robertson for the technical assistance in the preparation of the samples and A. Hart for cell culture. The mesenchymal stem cells were kindly provided by Professor R. Oreffo at University of Southampton.